


keep my head above the waves somehow

by TheTartWitch



Series: One-shots of AUs [19]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, Cannibalism (if the Fates are human?), Gen, Male Friendship, Merman Percy, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 09:29:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10716705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: For a while, in the beginning, he sang. He stopped when the witches relieved him of his vocal chords.





	keep my head above the waves somehow

**Author's Note:**

> Found this in my old files and thought I'd post it. It's not actually terrible, so...:)

Every day the acid bites deeper, the sea-witches take more of him, the sky grows darker. He thrashed in the beginning, screaming for his father, for Zeus, for heroes, but now he is still and silent for every mutilation. He is chained to a rock like Atlas, imprisoned for an imagined slight against a jealous goddess who’d forgotten him now. It doesn’t matter what becomes of him now; everyone he once knew has forgotten he ever existed in favor of hiding Olympus’s undesirable underbelly of envy, hatred, and quiet, seething unpleasantness and lies. 

For a while, in the beginning, he sang. He stopped when the witches relieved him of his vocal chords.

-

The eye is his; he feels the change of hands, the zap of energy when a demigod’s charmed fingers touch it and demand payment from the witches as he once did. The audacity of it saw him sentenced to this rock, but then his cousins were advising mortals and the like to try it, to use it, and every time they do it’s like Zeus flattening him again, lighting up every godly nerve like a beacon of pain. He doesn’t scream, though. He couldn’t even if he wanted to: no vocal chords.

\--

When his demigod cousin enters the Underworld for the first time, he sends a shade of himself slipping between the cracks of the world to accompany the boy. 

“Who are you?” Asks the boy angrily, suspiciously, as any child of Hades has a right to be, but he cannot answer. He settles in by the boy’s side and shows him the way through the Labyrinth, teaches him Daedalus’s symbols and where to find the trickster. This boy is worthy of his gifts, he has seen it, and so he coaches the child to find chinks in monster armor, to twist when he strikes for maximum damage, to get faster, better, stronger in the face of a giant’s opposition. He shows everything to the boy, hopes the boy will find him, will know him when he does.

\--

“Who are you?” Asks the boy one night; their last night together. Tomorrow, he must return to the cave of the witches and suffer all they have done to him in his absence, but tonight he won’t leave this boy alone. “You’re not dead, I’d feel it. Where have you hidden the rest of you?”

He palms a small ball, feels it give around his fingers, before opening them to show the boy the eye in his hand. It rolls and lolls and stares at the boy with a vividly sea-green pupil.

“I’ve seen that before…” says the boy thoughtfully. “Where?”

He creates three figures out of the Mist, hunched crones with empty eye sockets, and tosses the Misty eye towards one. The other two converge on her in a sudden frenzy, like carrion birds to the kill. 

“The Fates,” says the boy, finally understanding, “The Fates have taken your eye?”

He gestures to the rest of himself as well, smiles sadly, and vanishes.

\--

He waits months for the boy to come for him, years to hear his voice again, until finally his attention is called to Olympus.

“The Fates have a soul wrongfully imprisoned!” His boy declares, standing battered and headstrong before the Council of Gods. “I would have him freed.”

“And how would you know him?” Zeus sneers, and he thrashes in the witches’ bonds. 

“I’ve seen him,” the boy says. “Let him go, he has served them long enough.” 

Zeus grumbles for a moment, staring at son of Hades with something like relief and disappointment, before nodding a reluctant concession. “Very well! Perseus Jackson, merman, son of Poseidon and Sailia, you have served your punishment long enough. Return to us.”

\--

He lies on the tile of Olympus, cold and quiet and too still to move. Poseidon kneels beside him, grimacing at the missing bits of flesh revealing shattered and bruised bone, and grips his intact hand. His boy kneels on the other side, whispering his name over and over. His tail doesn’t flop or heave, barely attached as it is, and even Zeus looks disgusted by his state. 

He is carried by Poseidon to a large, glass tank containing a quietly lowing cow-beast with a tail that curls around him as he sinks to the bottom. He remembers the beast, he thinks, he named it  _ Bessie  _ millennia ago, before he even knew the witches existed. 

Through his one remaining eye, he watches the demigods watch him. A blonde girl is staring with open fascination and horror, occasionally glaring at the Council. Athena hides from the girl’s disgusted gaze, and later she corners her mother by his tank and begs to know what he’d done to deserve such treatment.  _ Torture _ , she calls it.

How unlike her mother she is.

“He threatened to steal the eye of the Fates, and fed it to a bird when the Fates refused to answer his questions. So Zeus, and the Council, sentenced him to  _ become _ the eye of the Fates.”

_ Liar _ , he calls her, and she turns to stare.  _ Liars, all of you. As though you did not send the owl, patron of them as you are. You always despised my father, and now you lie in your own defense.  _

The party is still and silent, with every eye present stuck on Athena’s shaking fingers and how she swallows before answering. “I did what I thought was best, even if it wasn’t kind.”

The girl is frozen, expressionless, but after a moment she turns away. “I know,” she says, but she doesn’t look back as she walks away. Athena’s eyes pinch.

\--

His boy sits by his tank for the rest of the night, watching with gruesome fascination as the water restores his health slowly, scales regrowing and limbs slowly, slowly reattaching. The Fates have made stew of him for years, taking the best meat and the most tasty offal they can harvest of him.

They don’t speak. Millennia of silence have banished the voice from his breath, and now the loudest sound he makes is the wheeze of air bubbles as the water’s magic rebuilds his lungs and throat.

But that’s okay. They don’t need to talk. Nico will be there when Percy is done healing, and Percy will be there for the rest of Nico’s life, for as long as he should need him, because that’s what friends do. They save each other’s lives and ask nothing in return; they demand justice for each other’s sakes; they fight anything that threatens their friend’s happiness. 

They don’t need anything else.


End file.
